Consider these two cases:
A university graduate on a job hunt just can’t find something that matches his skills. People never get back to him, interviews go nowhere, pretty opportunities peter out. Attempt after attempt leaves him frustrated and empty-handed, and as his motivation thins or his desperation thickens, he finally decides that he needs something and applies for a job he’s massively overqualified for, maybe an entry-level position in a supermarket. Then, to his horror, that job rejects him.
A woman trying to pay her bills runs into complications—her checking account is overcharged by an unexpected payment, a new emergency crops up or someone in her life needs her help. Running out of ideas, she finally elects to sell her more valuable items. The process of losing so much is tearful, but she prepares to part with most of her library, her furniture, her entertainment and so on. Only after trying this does she discover no one wants any of it—used bookstores won’t give her more than $30 for her collection and no one will respond to her ads.
I’ve had experiences like these, even today. And I think the root of much learned helplessness in my life stems from situations like these where things are measurably worse than I’d thought possible. I would call this insufficient cynicism, but I think it’s a combination of both overvaluing the likelihood and value of certain options combined with flinching away from thinking about them too closely.
Some options don’t work out, and some options are painful to consider, but options that are both can be generators of helplessness and bitterness. I graduated early with a degree in Communications, and my experiences since have made my wish dearly that I’d made different choices; looking back, what would need to be different for me to predict that this achievement would make no actual difference to my career?
I’m skeptical that reading LessWrong helps; I had the Sequences and HPMOR under my belt well before I graduated. I also received the advice that I should take something like a business degree, though maybe not often or forcefully enough to sink in. If someone had taken me to one side, shook me by the shoulders and told me in no uncertain terms the difficulties I’d have, I want to think I’d have chosen differently.
I think cynicism often assumes an unreasonable level of hindsight, though. If we were in another branch of the multiverse where I’m an assistant librarian or working HR somewhere, it would be wrong of me to say that I’d overvalued my degree. And of course I may wind up doing one of those things, in which case it was good for me to have a degree after all, but if I had perfect foresight on graduation day I’d have done something else in the few years between getting the degree and getting the position.
Thinking more about it, I think one of the major factors in these traps is that avoiding them codes them as final actions. There’s a gun on the mantle you never touch, and when you finally pull it down in an act of desperation it winds up being jammed from so many years of disuse. Or there’s money in your mattress you never even look at for a decade, and then when you need it the most half of it’s vanished. In real life last resorts don’t really exist—a problem that no available solution will work on can at least be broken into smaller problems on which further solutions can be attempted.
Thus it was written, “The repeated failures didn’t matter, they only led into the next action in the chain—but he still needed a next action—”